Will Smith’s five greatest songs, ranked by the man himself
Alright, we all know the deal with Will Smith and what happened.
He was one of the biggest, most bankable movie stars on the planet for over 20 years, then he didn’t like a joke that Chris Rock told about his wife at the 2022 Oscar ceremony and so, live in front of tens of millions of people, he calmly strode up to the stage and slapped him across his chops.
Even now, thinking about it or watching it back is absolutely insane. Really, it is quite unlike any other televised celebrity moment one can think of; there’s Kanye interrupting Taylor Swift at a push, but we are talking about one of the most famous men on Earth assaulting another celebrity. In black tie. Over a joke.
Smith has ended up struggling to get things back on track to say the least, so egregious was the incident, and his general offscreen persona probably doesn’t help things too much. There’s the strange relationship with Jada Pinkett-Smith that gets played out on podcasts for one, and there’s also the fact that he’s never really apologised to Rock or for the slap, instead rambling on about his own personal journey and the dollop.
He’s recently attempted to give rap a bit of a go again; in fairness to Smith, his music career has, without doubt, been a massively successful one all told. He has sold over 50 million albums since his first, Big Willie Style in 1997, and those sit alongside some 25m singles sold, including the mega-hits ‘Gettin’ Jiggy Wit it’ and ‘Men in Black’, each of which went Multi-Platinum.
Chuck in his records with DJ Jazzy Jeff as the Fresh Prince, and you have another 5.5m album sales thanks to hits like the barbecue essential ‘Summertime’. So it’s fair to say he’s done pretty well outside of acting, which he was equally good at before ‘the slap’—picking up an Academy Award (moments later) for King Richard—with his blockbuster movies like Independence Day and I, Robot, grossing more than $10billion in total.
But what does Smith think are his best songs? Well, we were able to recently discover just that when Capital Radio asked Philadelphia-born Smith to blind-rank his top five hits. He led by placing ‘Gettin’ Jiggy Wit’ It at number three with “no hesitation”. His 2005 song ‘Switch’ came next, which he put at number five.
Next came his massive ‘And the Beat Goes On’ sampling smash ‘Miami’, released in 1997 and which featured Ryan Gosling’s wife Eva Mendes in the music video. Smith placed that at number two. When the theme tune to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air came over the headphones, it threw Smith, who exclaimed, “I’ve definitely messed up in my ranking, cos I wasn’t thinking about that one… I’m gonna put it at number four”.
Knowing what was likely to come, Smith nailed his top one with ‘Summertime’, the laid back track that made the most of his newfound fame from his TV show in 1991. “There it is,” he added, “I’ve done quite well”.
Smith is hitting the publicity path in support of his tour, which incorporates the likes of the dazzling Scarborough Open Air Theatre and somewhere in Wolverhampton, before heading off overseas to places like Morocco. For what it’s worth, the actor has also released a new single, called ‘Pretty Girls’, which is, to be generous, utterly woeful. And includes the lyrics, “Heads, shoulders, knees and toes”. Seriously, watch the video.
